Explaining this occasionally confounds people who think that I wrote Cimorene as some sort of feminist statement about what women can achieve. I find their surprise hard to understand. My real-life family and friends are full of women like Cimorene, from my twin cousins, who have been fur trappers in the Alaskan bush for most of their lives, to my mother, who became an engineer long before women’s liberation officially opened “nontraditional careers” to women, to my grandmothers, aunts, and cousins, who were office managers, farmers, nurses, nuns, geologists, and bookkeepers, among other things. None of these women takes any guff from anyone. They aren’t proving a point about what women could, should, or can do; they are ignoring that whole question (which none of them considers a question worth asking at all) and getting on with doing the things that interest them most.

Cimorene, Morwen, Kazul, and the other women of the Enchanted Forest owe a lot to these real-life women, but they are none of them portraits of actual, specific people of my acquaintance. My characters aren’t even composites, deliberately constructed by reassembling aspects of real-life women. They are themselves, characters I invented as minor players in Talking to Dragons who came into their own, more fully fleshed out and realized, in this book.

Working with them again was fun, as was adding new players such as Princess Alianora, Roxim, and the Stone Prince. I also had a much clearer idea of the fractured-fairy-tale setting, which allowed me to be more deliberate about introducing twists on fairy tales than I had been in the original book.

When I finally turned the manuscript in to Jane Yolen, I once again thought that would be the end of things. I was wrong; I still had two more books to write . . . but that, as they say, is another story.

1

In Which Cimorene Refuses to Be Proper and Has a Conversation with a Frog

LINDERWALL WAS A LARGE KINGDOM, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable. The climate was unremarkable. The knights kept their armor brightly polished mainly for show—it had been centuries since a dragon had come east. There were the usual periodic problems with royal children and uninvited fairy godmothers, but they were always the sort of thing that could be cleared up by finding the proper prince or princess to marry the unfortunate child a few years later. All in all, Linderwall was a very prosperous and pleasant place.

Cimorene hated it.

Cimorene was the youngest daughter of the King of Linderwall, and her parents found her rather trying. Their first six daughters were perfectly normal princesses, with long, golden hair and sweet dispositions, each more beautiful than the last. Cimorene was lovely enough, but her hair was jet black, and she wore it in braids instead of curled and pinned like her sisters.